Obviously, getting your site back up and running requires figuring out the problem and resolving it. Hopefully, it’s a quick-and-easy solution. But if it’s not, that’s why you have someone managing your website to figure it out.

If you want to make sure that you’re the first person to know that your site is down — before you start getting angry or upset emails and tweets about it from your users — there’s a free tool that lets you know.

Pingdom’s Uptime Monitoring Alerts You When There’s a Problem

Pingdom, maker of the amazing Website Speed Test, has a full suite of products to make sure your site is working as it should be.

One of their featured products is Uptime Monitoring, a tool that regularly checks your website to make sure it’s working … and when it isn’t, lets you know.

Every few minutes, Uptime Monitoring sends a ping — essentially, a quick query — to your website to make sure it’s running. This ping acts like a real user, ensuring that the site loads without errors.

It’s easily the quickest way to get notified that your site is down and users can’t connect.

Multiple Test Locations, Response Time and Uptime Reports

The ability to alert you that your site is down is easily Pingdom’s best feature, but it’s actually packed full with additional useful tools.

Uptime Monitoring doesn’t just check your website from one location; it can check your website from more than 70 places all over the world. This matters because it may not be your server that’s having an issue; it may be some ISP that’s having trouble connecting.

Pingdom also offers great reporting on your website, including historical outages, a log of test results, and your site’s average response time.

If you have more than one person who should be alerted when your site isn’t available, you can set up multiple users and even teams to get notifications and access to reporting.

And if that isn’t enough, Pingdom can even help troubleshoot the issue for you with their Root Cause Analysis tool. If it’s a problem with your server — like you’ve been hacked or have run out of hard disk space — it won’t be able to quantify that, but it can identify the server response code and help point you in the right direction.

Jason Unger is the Founder of Digital Ink, the creative and digital team that builds brands and helps companies grow. Based outside of Washington, D.C., Jason has done it all, from website strategy, design, development, troubleshooting, maintenance, content and marketing.